14 DAY TRIAL // 
There are times when playing Cloudbuilt is an entirely infuriating experience as I fail to run across a wall at the right angle or jump up to a ledge and fail to spot a set of obstacles and a turret that quickly makes short work of the protagonist.
There are also moments when the free flowing platformer, played from a third-person perspective, is a superb experience that offers gamers moment after moment of freedom if they manage to choose just the right move in order to get past obstacles, avoid traps and then take out enemies before reaching the red door at the end of the level.
Most of the time, Cloudbuilt is somewhere between these two extremes and combines the platforming of something like Portal with a careful use of time and resources that it shares with 10 Second Ninja.
The story of the game is simple and not all that interesting, with the main character, Demi, a former soldier that is now in a deep coma, expressing herself as a form of mental energy that can exist both in the real world of her hospital room and inside her own mind.
There, the gorgeously detailed protagonist needs to explore a number of levels in order to get some snippets about her past and eventually come back to life.
It’s unclear why the free running sections exist in the mind of Demi or how they affect her physical state, but Cloudbuilt is less interested in the solidity of its narrative than in creating carefully layered levels that the gamer can explore.
Demi is exceptionally nimble, able to run up walls and diagonally across sections of terrain that hang over the emptiness of space and she also has a power suit with a limited energy supply that allows her to enhance her moves.
I knew that Cloudbuilt was going to offer a challenge as soon as I failed to progress through the tutorial level a dozen times because I mistimed the moment that I leapt from one wall to another, but the game does offer a sense of accomplishment each time the player reaches a new checkpoint or the end of a level.
The experience can easily be frustrating in the long term, but the various individual challenges are interesting enough to keep me trying over and over until I manage to combine the right path, solid free running and good use of my energy supply to reach my target.
The difficulty level of Cloudbuilt is increased by two factors: the need to be very precise when using the controls and the big spaces between checkpoints in the levels.
The game can only be controlled using a mouse and keyboard setup and the difference between the various moves the character can perform can be minute, which means that a player needs to be incredibly careful in order to succeed, something that’s not always possible while running at speed and worrying about enemies.
At the same time, the development team has been a little too stingy with its checkpoints, which means that one bad move can set the player back quite a bit.
Cloudbuilt looks lovely, with a touch of cell shading that gives the game world and the main character a lot of character, and the music is also very well suited to the fast-paced running and the quick decisions that gamers need to make.
The game is very interesting and can be extremely fun for those players who have a knack for quickly determining paths through levels and then quickly using the arsenal of moves provided to get to the finish point.
But Cloudbuilt can also be extremely frustrating for slower and less nimble gamers, although the beauty of the world and the level of challenge will probably keep them interested.
